BRASILIA (Reuters) - A Brazilian appeals court rejected on Monday final procedural objections raised by lawyers of former leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva against his conviction for corruption, raising the possibility that he will soon be jailed.

However, Lula will not be imprisoned until the country's Supreme Court decides on April 4 whether to accept his request that he be allowed to exhaust his appeals process before landing in jail.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that defendants should begin serving prison sentences after their conviction was upheld on a first appeal. However, several members of the court are pressing to revisit that decision and perhaps reverse it.

Lula, Brazil's first working-class leader, remains the most popular politician in Latin America's biggest nation. He oversaw years of robust growth and falling inequality during a commodity boom last decade, and wants to run again for president.

Whether he is jailed or not, Lula is barred from running due to his conviction for receiving as a bribe a seaside apartment from an entrepreneur awarded government contracts during his presidency.

SAO BERNARDO DO CAMPO, Brazil — Latin America’s largest nation prepared for what would have been unimaginable just a few years ago: the arrest of former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a once wildly popular leader whose administrations were credited with bringing millions out of poverty in one of the world’s most unequal countries.

Federal judge Sergio Moro, seen by many in Brazil as a crusader against graft, gave da Silva until 5 p.m. local time Friday to turn himself in and begin serving a sentence of 12 years and one month for a corruption conviction.

Moro’s warrant Thursday evening came after Brazil’s top court, the Supreme Federal Tribunal, voted 6-5 to deny a request by the former president to stay out of prison while he appealed a conviction that he contends was simply a way to keep him off the ballot in October’s election. He is the front-running presidential candidate despite his conviction. ...

It’s unclear whether da Silva will present himself in the city of Curitiba, as Moro has ordered, or perhaps instead force police to come and get him.

The judge said the left-wing politician must be released from prison in Curitiba while an appeal process is carried out.

Lula, who led the country from 2003 to 2010, had been sentenced to 12 years and one month in prison for corruption and money laundering. He was jailed after a close vote, with six Supreme Court Justice in favour of jailing him and five against.

He has always proclaimed his innocence, saying the conviction was politically motivated.

Polls conducted before he was jailed in April suggested that Lula was the frontrunner for the presidential elections, which will be held in October.

Brazil’s oldest and most important historical and scientific museum has been consumed by fire, and much of its archive of 20 million items is believed to have been destroyed.

The fire at Rio de Janeiro’s 200-year-old National Museum began after it closed to the public on Sunday and raged into the night. There were no reports of injuries, but the loss to Brazilian science, history and culture was incalculable, two of its vice-directors said.

“It was the biggest natural history museum in Latin America. We have invaluable collections. Collections that are over 100 years old,” Cristiana Serejo, one of the museum’s vice directors, told the G1 news site.

Marina Silva, a former environment minister and candidate in October’s presidential elections said the fire was like “a lobotomy of the Brazilian memory”.

Luiz Duarte, another vice-director, told TV Globo: “It is an unbearable catastrophe. It is 200 years of this country’s heritage. It is 200 years of memory. It is 200 years of science. It is 200 years of culture, of education.” TV Globo also reported that some firefighters did not have enough water to battle the blaze.

BELEM, Brazil — Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, the frontrunner in the country’s October elections, was stabbed in the abdomen during a campaign rally in southeastern Brazil on Thursday, his family said.

He was in stable condition at a local hospital, his son said in message posted to Twitter.

Cellphone footage released by local media showed the candidate sitting on a supporter’s shoulders and waving to the crowd when someone plunged a knife into his abdomen. He was carried by his supporters to a car, clutching his side.

A right-wing former soldier and evangelical, he has topped the polls with an estimated 22 percent of prospective votes, after a judge barred former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from running last week due to corruption charges.

Bolsonaro is running on a tough-on-crime platform and has advocated for looser restrictions on gun ownership in Brazil.

Demonstrations held against Jair Bolsonaro’s extremist stance ahead of election

The homecoming of Brazil’s far-right presidential frontrunner Jair Bolsonaro from hospital was upstaged this weekend by huge demonstrations as concerns over his authoritarian tendencies grew.

Bolsonaro flew from São Paulo to his home in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday, three weeks after being stabbed during campaigning, while tens of thousands of women filled the streets in cities across Brazil to protest against his extremist positions ahead of the 7 October election.

The G1 news site reported anti-Bolsonaro protests in all Brazil’s 27 states grew out of a Facebook group called Women United Against Bolsonaro which nearly 4 million people have joined. Pro-Bolsonaro demonstrations took place in 16 states, the site said. The piauí magazine website called the demonstrations “historic” and printed a photo of an enormous crowd in São Paulo which organisers claimed half a million attended, though police did not provide an estimate. ...

Many demonstrators expressed concerns over Bolsonaro’s declaration in a television interview on Friday that he would not accept any election result he did not win because of his endorsement of the military dictatorship which ran Brazil for two decades.

Cruz was the 296th person to die in Feira de Santana this year and the latest victim of an escalating murder crisis that has arguably made public security the key issue as Brazil holds its most unpredictable presidential election in decades.

Ahead of Sunday’s vote, the country’s uncontrolled violence is fuelling support for the far-right pacemaker Jair Bolsonaro, who has opened up a 10-point lead over his closest rival, the Workers’ party (PT) candidate, Fernando Haddad, with many followers citing security as their main reason for championing the 63-year-old politician.

Many are horrified at the rise of a pro-torture populist notorious for his vicious and incendiary remarks about women, black people, indigenous communities, human rights and Brazil’s LGBT community.

But Latin America’s largest democracy suffered a record 63,880 homicides last year – more than 6,000 of them in the north-eastern state of Bahia, where Feira is located – and Bolsonaro has promised no-nonsense fixes, including loosening gun laws. ...

Twenty-four hours after her teenage neighbour was interred, Farias was preparing to meet an entrepreneur she hoped might bankroll a social project to get young men off the streets and away from drugs. She said she felt so neglected by politicians she would boycott Sunday’s election. ...

“I don’t see any real proposals … [so] what’s the point in exercising my right as a citizen?” she wondered, before adding: “Even if my own father was a candidate, I wouldn’t vote for him.”

SAO PAULO — A far-right former army captain who expresses nostalgia for Brazil’s military dictatorship won the first round of its presidential election by a surprisingly large margin Sunday but fell just short of getting enough votes to avoid a second-round runoff against a leftist rival.

Jair Bolsonaro, whose last-minute surge almost gave him an electoral stunner, had 46.7 percent compared to 28.5 percent for former Sao Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Tribunal said after all the votes were counted. He needed over 50 percent support to win outright.

Polls predicted Bolsonaro would come out in front on Sunday, but he far outperformed expectations, blazing past competitors with more financing, institutional backing of parties and free air time on television. Despite the sizable victory, polls show the two candidates are neck-and-neck for the Oct. 28 runoff, and much could shift in the coming weeks.

Ultimately, Bolsonaro’s strong showing reflects a yearning for the past as much as a sign of the future. The candidate from the tiny Social and Liberal Party made savvy use of Twitter and Facebook to spread his message that only he could end the corruption, crime and economic malaise that has seized Brazil in recent years — and bring back the good old days and traditional values. ...

This election was seen as the great hope for ending a turbulent era in which many politicians and business executives were jailed on corruption charges, a president was impeached and removed from office in controversial proceedings, and the region’s largest economy suffered a protracted recession.

'Flowering of hate': bitter election brings wave of political violence to Brazil

The two contenders in Brazil’s bitterly contested presidential race have urged calm after a wave of attacks on journalists, activists and members of the LGBT community by supporters of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro including beatings, a knife attack and a murder.

Supporters of the former paratrooper – himself the victim of an assassination attempt last month – have also reportedly been targeted with violence.

But an investigation by independent journalism group Agência Publica found that an overwhelming majority of the violence was committed by supporters of Bolsonaro, who polls give a 16-point lead over his leftist opponent, Fernando Haddad, ahead of the second-round runoff on 28 October.

Agência Pública said bolsonaristas were behind 50 separate attacks since 30 September. In the same period, six Bolsonaro supporters were assaulted, the report found.

“There is a flowering of hate that I have never seen before,” said a reporter who was attacked by Bolsonaro supporters in the north-eastern city of Recife. “I am frightened because it could be anyone now.”

Voter frustration over spiraling violence and eye-watering corruption – as well as an explosion of inflammatory fake news – mean an unusually toxic atmosphere has enveloped this year’s election.

Folha also reported the companies are planning a massive misinformation campaign next week, just days before the final presidential vote on Sunday, Oct. 28. WhatsApp, Facebook’s ubiquitous messaging service, has been under attack around the world for allowing the spread of rumors, false news, and political lies, sometimes with deadly consequences.

Experts told Folha that the WhatsApp campaign could have broken the law in at least three ways: Companies, like those allegedly bankrolling the operation, are forbidden from making political donations; any electoral spending must be registered with regulators, and this wasn’t; and it’s illegal to buy large phone number lists to distribute messages, as was reportedly done here.

If it’s proven that Bolsonaro benefitted from the messaging campaign, his candidacy could be cancelled, or if he has already been elected, he could be removed from the presidency.

SAO PAULO (AP) — Thousands of people took to the streets in Brazil Saturday to protest the candidacy of presidential front-runner Jair Bolsonaro, shouting "Not him!" which has become the rallying cry against the far-right former army captain.

In Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and 24 other cities, large crowds filled avenues and squares a week before the Oct. 28 second-round vote polls suggest Bolsonaro is likely to win.

Bolsonaro, who has angered many Brazilians by praising the country's 1964-1985 military dictatorship and making comments offensive to gays, women and blacks, won the first round of voting on Oct. 7, getting 46 percent against 29 for Fernando Haddad of the Workers' Party.

In front of the Sao Paulo Art Museum, people beat drums and waved gay pride flags as they denounced Bolsonaro. Many carried cardboard signs bearing Haddad's name and photo.

Tiago Silva, a 27-year-old philosophy teacher, said Bolsonaro "represents the fascism, intolerance and violence we are seeing in Europe and in the United States."

The rising political tide of right-wing nationalist movements appears poised to crest next in Brazil, where a torture-supporting apologist for military dictatorships and police killings appears to be headed for a victory in this Sunday’s presidential election. The U.S. right-wing is cheering his rise.

Legislator Jair Bolsonaro is riding a wave of public anger over crime and corruption, with a lot of help from the military, big agricultural interests, and conservative evangelicals—the “Bullets, Beef and Bibles” caucus. A Bolsonaro victory could signal “a major step toward authoritarianism,” writes Michael Albertus at Foreign Policy.

On Sunday, Bolsonaro gave a “fiery and confrontational speech” to supporters in which he reportedly pledged to jail his opponent and said, “These red criminals will be banished from our homeland.” Said Bolsonaro, “It will be a cleansing never seen in the history of Brazil”—a frightening promise given the brutality of the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985.

Bolsonaro excels at hateful rhetoric. He once said that he would rather his son die in a car accident than be gay. He has called Afro-Brazilians lazy and fat. He told a female legislator that she wasn’t even worth raping. He publicly dedicated his congressional vote to impeach former President Dilma Rousseff to the head of a torture unit under which she was tortured during the military dictatorship. He has praised Chile’s dictator Pinochet, who killed thousands, for doing “what had to be done.”

We reported in August that Bolsonaro was getting a boost from former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann. And we noted that U.S. Religious Right groups have been operating in Brazil as part of the globalization of the “culture wars,” even as the Koch brothers’ donor networks fueled pro-business libertarian groups in the country. Private companies have reportedly flouted Brazilian election law by spending millions to promote Bolsonaro’s candidacy.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil on Sunday became the latest country to drift toward the far right, electing a strident populist as president in the nation’s most radical political change since democracy was restored more than 30 years ago.

The new president, Jair Bolsonaro, has exalted the country’s military dictatorship, advocated torture and threatened to destroy, jail or drive into exile his political opponents.

He won by tapping into a deep well of resentment at the status quo in Brazil — a country whiplashed by rising crime and two years of political and economic turmoil — and by presenting himself as the alternative.

Mr. Bolsonaro, who will take the helm of Latin America’s biggest nation, is farther to the right than any president in the region, where voters have recently embraced more conservative leaders in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Paraguay and Colombia. He joins a number of far-right politicians who have risen to power around world, including Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.

“This is a really radical shift,” said Scott Mainwaring, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government who specializes in Brazil. “I can’t think of a more extremist leader in the history of democratic elections in Latin America who has been elected.”

With 92 percent of votes counted, Mr. Bolsonaro was ahead with 55 percent, carving out a significant advantage over Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers’ Party, who had 44 percent.

Even though many moons ago my academic focus was Latin America, and I read quite a bit about the Southern Cone Dictatorships and the Brazilian Generals, I have not kept up on Brazil and Bolsonaro. This is very tragic, especially his open affection for those shitheel fascists...This is an interesting overview of how the Right has had great success warping political environments with propaganda via social media and apps...

This Is How We Radicalized The World
On Sunday, far-right evangelical Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil. The era of being surprised at this kind of politics is over. Now we have to live with what we've done.

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — From the balcony of BuzzFeed’s São Paulo office right now, you can hear screams of “Ele Não” echoing through the city’s winding avenues. It’s the same phrase I’ve seen graffitied all over the city this month. The same one I heard chanted from restaurants and bars all afternoon. It means “not him” — him being Bolsonaro. But his victory tonight isn’t a surprise. He’s just one more product of the strange new forces that dictate the very fabric of our lives.

It’s been a decade since I first felt like something was changing about the way we interact with the internet. In 2010, as a young news intern for a now-defunct website called the Awl, one of the first pieces I ever pitched was an explainer about why 4chan trolls were trying to take the also now-defunct website Gawker off the internet via a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. It was a world I knew. I was a 19-year-old who spent most of my time doing what we now recognize as “shitposting.” It was the beginning of an era where our old ideas about information, privacy, politics, and culture were beginning to warp.

I’ve followed that dark evolution of internet culture ever since. I’ve had the privilege — or deeply strange curse — to chase the growth of global political warfare around the world. In the last four years, I’ve been to 22 countries, six continents, and been on the ground for close to a dozen referendums and elections. I was in London for UK’s nervous breakdown over Brexit, in Barcelona for Catalonia’s failed attempts at a secession from Spain, in Sweden as neo-Nazis tried to march on the country’s largest book fair. And now, I’m in Brazil. But this era of being surprised at what the internet can and will do to us is ending. The damage is done. I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that I’ll probably spend the rest of my career covering the consequences.

And now, this week, Bolsonaro has won the Brazilian general election using a toxic and perfectly social media–optimized mix of evangelism, nationalism, and strongman posturing to create a cult of personality that threatens to send the country back into a military dictatorship. It seems like he’s settled on using WhatsApp as his online propaganda tool of choice. In the final days before the second vote, it was revealed that Brazilian marketing firms have been using WhatsApp to flood voters’ phones with anti-leftist propaganda. Then he announced in a Facebook video several days later that if he becomes president, he aims to change a rule created by WhatsApp that limits the number of simultaneous messages a user can send at once.

President Trump on Monday touted what he characterized as an “excellent call” with Jair Bolsonaro, the president-elect of Brazil, pledging to work closely with the far-right lawmaker and nationalist on a wide array of issues.

“Had a very good conversation with the newly elected President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who won his race by a substantial margin,” Trump said in a tweet about the Sunday call. “We agreed that Brazil and the United States will work closely together on Trade, Military and everything else! Excellent call, wished him congrats!” ...

Bolsonaro defeated leftist Fernando Haddad in a runoff, receiving about 55 percent of the vote, according to official results with nearly 100 percent of the ballots tallied. His win adds Brazil to a growing list of countries — from the United States to Hungary to the Philippines — where staunch right-wing nationalists have scored victories at the ballot box.

Bolsonaro ran a social-media-centered campaign similar to Trump’s that promised to attack the corruption of political elites and bring an iron fist to fighting crime. He demonized opponents and polarized the nation with his history of denigrating women, gays and minorities.

Rodrigo Castriota
@castriotar
More than 20 Brazilian universities were invaded by the military police in the past 2 days. They confiscated material on the history of fascism, interrupted classes due to 'ideological content', removed anti-fascist banners and posters claiming that it was electoral propaganda.

The new president-elect is an agent of the world’s most reactionary tendencies, many of them exported from the United States.

Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president-elect, who won Sunday’s second-round vote with a staggering 55 percent of the ballet, is an open fascist, a violent phobe of every decent thing. A misogynist who said he would rather see his son dead than accept him as gay, Bolsonaro is an agent of the world’s most reactionary tendencies, someone who joins fake-news-style social-media manipulation to old-fashioned death-squad repression. The makeup of Brazil’s congress looks grim as well, and the military will have his back—there’s little foreseeable break on what he can do. Markets are soaring. Global proud boys are dancing.

The mega-dozers are revving their engines, and the earth will be pushed to the limits, as Bolsonaro peeled off some of the landless vote by promising he’d remove prohibitions on colonizing the vast Amazon, even as his soy, lumber, mining, and cattle backers will lay waste to far larger swaths than any peasant ax could. “For Canadian business, a Bolsonaro presidency could open new investment opportunities,” the CBC reported last night shortly after the results were announced, “as he has pledged to slash environmental regulations in the Amazon rain forest and privatize some government-owned companies.” “Our Amazon is like a child with chickenpox, every dot you see is an indigenous reservation,” Bolsonaro has said, promising to do away with land set-asides for native peoples.

Brazil is one of the world’s largest economies, so it’s not hyperbole to say the election is a geopolitical Pittsburgh massacre. During the campaign, Bolsonaro’s supporters targeted his opponents for violent hate crimes, including carving a swastika into the skin of a 19-year-old woman carrying an LGBT flag. The crackdown on universities began even before his final victory. Just a week ago, Brazil’s new president-elect pledged that upon winning he would carry out “a cleansing never before seen in the history of Brazil.” Last year, he said he’d “give carte blanche for the police to kill.” Election day wasn’t even over when São Paulo’s new governor said he’d pay for the “best lawyers” to defend police who execute criminals. The targets will be, overwhelmingly, poor urban black boys and men, along with rural land and environmental activists.

There’s a lot to grapple with in Bolsonaro’s win, not least the way it reflects the successful importation of US-style right-wing cultural politics into Latin America, represented by what in this country are often called wedge issues, including abortion, sexual rights, guns, gender equality, prayer in school, and so-called “religious freedom.” Two years ago, when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, there was a lot of talk about how he represented the Latin Americanization of US politics, a kind of populist style associated with Third World dictators. But if one were to look beyond form and rhetoric, and get to the content of politics, what is truly worrying is how the influence flows in the opposite direction. The whole world, or at least a good part of Latin America, is becoming, to use Thomas Frank’s famous metaphor on the topic, Kansas.

Conservatives Admire Brazil’s Strongman and Compare Him to Trump. Gulp.

Here are some of the events that have transpired in the United States over the last week. The ruling party has portrayed the opposition as an unruly mob that would pose a threat to law and order if allowed to share power. The president has called independent news media the “enemy of the people” and asserted that its critical reporting is to blame for a wave of attempted bombings against it. He has portrayed a small caravan of refugees hundreds of miles from the border as an existential threat and deployed thousands of soldiers to the border. And he has floated a plan to alter the Constitution through executive order.

The thinking person’s rationalization is that this is all just so much hot air. “Trump is a dictator on Twitter, a Dear Leader in his own mind, but in the real world there is no Trumpocracy because Trump cannot even rule himself,” reasoned Ross Douthat earlier this year.

This Pollyannaish account is not necessarily wrong, but it does assume that Trump’s autocratic impulses can and will be stopped by something. Douthat credits the Republican Establishment for “normalizing Trump’s cabinet and judicial appointments” and “repeatedly, patiently talking the president out of his most disruptive or dangerous ideas.” This, in turn, assumes that the Republican Party as a whole is committed to democratic values, and possesses both the desire and the ability to stop the president well before he crosses any threshold of autocracy.

Hold that assumption in your head when you consider the jovial response in The Wall Street Journal to the election of right-wing authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency of Brazil. While not nearly as broad in its reach as Fox News, the Journal is the crown jewel of the Murdoch media empire, and its editorial page may be the most prestigious organ in the conservative movement.

Earlier this month, the Journal likened Bolsonaro, not inaccurately, to Trump himself. Calling him the “Brazilian Swamp Drainer,” an excited editorial all but endorsed the Trumpy right-wing insurgent. The editorial does allow that Bolsonaro “often says politically incorrect things about identity politics that inflame his opponents.” (To wit, he has said it is better to be dead than gay, called a woman too ugly to be worth raping, and described the Afro-Brazilian minority as worthless.)

Bolsonaro has long expressed contempt for democracy. “I would perform a coup on the same day,” he said in 1999. “The Congress today is useless … let’s do the coup already. Let’s go straight to the dictatorship.” During his recent, successful campaign, he threatened his opponents: “Either they go overseas, or they go to jail … These red outlaws will be banished from our homeland. It will be a cleanup the likes of which has never been seen in Brazilian history.”

White House national security adviser John Bolton on Thursday praised Jair Bolsonaro, the bombastic, far-right nationalist who triumphed in Brazil’s presidential election over the weekend, calling him a “like-minded” partner whose ascent should be seen as a welcome development in the region.

In a speech on U.S. policy toward Latin America, Bolton said Bolsonaro could be a partner in fighting against leftist leaders who sow instability in the region. He slammed socialist leaders in three countries — Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — as the “troika of tyranny.”

Bolsonaro is a legislator whose presidential campaign was punctuated by openly racist, sexist and homophobic comments he made — for instance, saying he would rather his son die than be gay. President Donald Trump also previously congratulated Bolsonaro on his election.

Bolton grouped Bolsonaro’s election with that of Colombian President Iván Duque, a rightist politician who has not been embroiled in similar controversies.

“The recent elections of like-minded leaders in key countries, including Iván Duque in Colombia and, last weekend, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, are positive signs for the future of the region, and demonstrate a growing regional commitment to free-market principles, and open, transparent and accountable governance,” Bolton said at Freedom Tower in Miami, a national historic landmark that served as a processing center for Cuban refugees in the 1960s.